1. Karl Marx and Marxism

2. Biography of Karl Marx Born in Trier located in Prussia in 1818.
His father was a Jewish lawyer who converted to Protestantism prior to Karl’s birth in order to be allowed to hold public office
Marx studied at the University of Berlin.
Influenced by German philosopher Hegel and adopted his principal of the “dialectic.”
Marx lived most of his life in exile -- fleeing the Rhineland in 1843, Paris in 1845, Brussels, and eventually settled in London.

3. Publications
Published Communist Manifesto in 1848 with co-author Frederick Engels.
Wrote 3 of 8 planned volumes of Capital (Das Kapital), starting in 1867

4. Marx and Capitalism He disliked everything about Capitalism.
He never thought the system could be corrected.
He believed that the Capitalism would never permit workers to receive their true rewards.

5. Frederick Engels (1820 – 1895)
Son of a successful German textile industrialist.
Sent to England in 1842 by his father to help manage his cotton factory in Manchester.
Shocked by the widespread poverty of the working class, Engels wroteThe Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

6. Marx and Engels Engels met Marx in Paris and took him to England.
Contrasting personalities
Engels was outgoing; Marx was quiet and withdrawn.
Engels like wine, women, and song; Marx reading in the British Museum.
Became a lifelong sponsor of Karl Marx supporting him financially.
Engels was a convinced and devoted communist who wrote several communist publications.
After Marx’s death, he edited and publicized several of Karl Marx’s works

7. Economic Determinism
Marx studied British economic records for 20 years to develop theory that everything is based on the economic system: politics, law, social structures, family relations, even religious belief.
History is shaped by economic forces – the way that goods are produced and distributed.
Economic systems go through historic cycles. Over time, an economic system becomes rigid and cannot adjust to new technologies, so a new system emerges, with new class relations and oppression. .

8. Hegelian Dialectic
Hegel conceived of history as the continuous conflict of ideas
Each idea (thesis) had its negation (anti-thesis) and out of the resulting struggle arose a new and higher idea (synthesis) which becomes a new thesis, etc.

9. Class Struggle
Marx accepts Hegelian dialectic, but substitutes the struggle of economic forces (Dialectical Materialism)
History is a dialectical process, a series of conflicts between antagonistic economic groups.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

10. Marx’s View of the Stages of History

11. Class Struggle
A class struggle exists between the “haves” and “have nots”.
Slave system gave way to feudal economy
Feudal economy broke down with growth of manufacturing, towns, navigation & transportation, emergence of middle class
In modern industrial society, the bourgeoisie, or middle-class capitalists, exploit the proletariat, or wage-earning laborers

12. Classes
Bourgeoisie: modern capitalists who own the means of production and therefore get to keep all the profits
Proletariat: modern wage laborers who sell their labor to live and don’t get any of the profits that they help to create.

13. Class Struggle
The class that holds economic power also controls the government for its own advantage.
The bourgeoisie begins to shrink, as shopkeepers and owners of small businesses are ruined by competition with powerful capitalists. The proletariat grows larger until society is composed of a few rich people and the proletarian masses.

14. Owners and Workers
Owners exploit workers and live off the money which the workers earn
Workers put up with this inequality because:
They are oppressed wage slaves and cannot fight the system
They are indoctrinated by ideology and religion into believing what they are told by the powerful.

15. Religion is the “opium of the masses”
Marx believed the values (or ideologies, to use his word) characteristic of a society are the tools of the dominate class because they mislead the populace about their true interests.
This is why he described religion as “the opium of the masses.” He reasoned that religious belief functioned to blind people so they could not recognize their exploitation and their real political interests.
Individual has no sense of personal value in one’s work.
Religion does this by emphasizing that salvation, compensation for misery and alienation on earth, will come in the next world. In effect, religious beliefs justify social inequality.

16. Surplus Value All wealth is created by the worker.
Capitalists exploit workers by paying them subsistence wages
Difference between the wages and the value of the goods the workers produce is the surplus value which the capitalists take as profit.
Workers are robbed of the “fruits” of their labor which leads to frustration.

17. Inevitability of Socialist Revolution
The class struggle would ultimately lead to a victory for the proletariat.
Capitalism creates huge factories. Workers become concentrated and begin to organize for legal reforms (higher wages/better working conditions). Their effort fails.
Fierce competition between capitalists leads to new technologies, which leads to lower costs.

18. Inevitability of Socialist Revolution
Greater numbers of people permanently unemployed. Misery widespread.
Fewer people can afford the products of capitalists, so fewer companies survive.
Class struggle reaches a climax.
Conditions now ripe for revolution. The politically aware, organized, and united proletariat will rise up and win.

19. Communist Revolution
Revolution will eliminate private property. No longer will man have the means of exploiting another man.
Bourgeoisie will fight, so revolution will be violent.
A dictatorship of the proletariat will follow to weed out remaining capitalist elements. All private property will be abolished. The vast majority of workers will suppress the minority of remaining capitalists.

20. The Worker’s Utopia
During communism, the bourgeois state, an instrument of suppression of the working class, would wither away because it would not have a function any longer.
People would live in an “association of free human beings”; class conflict would no longer exist, the means of production would be owned by everyone.
In the end, a classless society with no more oppression or internal contradictions.
People will be free to choose how they labor, and can be creatively productive. They will be able to live to their fullest potential.

21. Marx’s Communist Manifesto :
“In communist society, …nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes,… to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, … without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

22. Internationalism
Marx critiqued nationalism by insisting that “the working men have no country”.
He believed that all workers of the world are comrades, members of the class that have the historic mission of bringing about a social order.
Their interests transcend the limits of national loyalties.
Marx insisted that the “proletarians have nothing to lose but a world of chains”.
At the end of the manifesto, Marx writes: “Proletarians all of countries, unite!” and thus propagates class struggle and proletarian internationalism.

23. Marx’s Economic Theory
This historic process would be inevitable, as “the wheels of history” would keep on turning and the end of the power of the bourgeoisie could not be avoided; the communist revolution would be necessary and inevitable.
… yet it has never happened in advanced industrialized societies.

24. Problems for Marx
He didn’t take into account the non-material motives of the work force.
He never thought that the system could correct itself.
He failed to take into account the rising levels of Nationalism.
World War I – Nationalism won out over Socialist ideology

25. Engels on Marx
‘His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. … His name will endure through the ages, and so also will his work.’